“That’s an express elevator,” Cantor said. “It goes only to the higher floors.”

“Yeah,” Stone said. “The trouble is, none of what we see here actually makes him as our guy. Okay, his clothes look English, and he wears a hat; that’s about it. We don’t know if our guy has gained a lot of weight over the years or gone bald. I can’t tell if he’s wearing a toupee. We can’t really see his nose, either.”

“Well there’s one thing about him I like,” Cantor said.

“What’s that?”

“Of all the people we’ve looked at on this date, he has the most to recommend him.”

“Good point. What’s the date?”

“A couple of weeks ago.”

“Let’s look at the earlier dates, too,” Stone said, and Cantor racked up another cassette and began his search. An hour later he was done.

“Nope,” Cantor said. “We don’t have him on the earlier dates, just the most recent one.”

“How many men appear on both dates?” Stone asked.

“I don’t know, dozens, maybe many dozens. A lot of them work in the building every day.”

“Well, this guy, Mister Smith, doesn’t seem to work in the building. I think he’s visiting.”

“Visiting who?”

“Could be anybody-doctor, lawyer, dentist.”

“Are there dentists in the Seagram Building?”

“I don’t know. They’d be really, really expensive dentists, though, if they had offices there.”

“Nah,” Cantor said, “medical professionals need special plumbing and electrical; they mostly stick to buildings that specialize.”

“Can we do more to identify the floor he got off on?”

“I’ve tried,” Cantor said, “but people’s heads were in the way of the buttons.”

“Do we have shots of him returning to the lobby?” Stone asked.

“I haven’t seen any,” Cantor replied. “I’ll go through them again, though.”

“Let me know what you find,” Stone said, getting up from his seat. “I can’t look at that screen anymore.” He looked through one of the van’s darkened windows across the street. No sign of Dolce. “Bob, there’s something else.”

“What?”

“I’m being stalked by a tall, slender, dark-haired woman. She stands across the street and stares at my house.”

“Maybe she’s in real estate.”

“No. I know her. She was traveling with a keeper, but she knifed him the day before yesterday, then disappeared.”

“You want somebody in the house?”

“Yes, please. Joan is frightened, and I have a houseguest, too. I don’t want them hurt.”

“Do you want the stalker hurt?”

“No, not if it can be avoided.”

“I’ll put Peter Leahy on it,” Cantor said.

“Tell Peter to cuff her, if he can, but tell him to watch his ass; she’s very good with a knife.”

“Jesus, Stone, where do you find these women?”

“There’s only one like her,” Stone replied, “and she found me.”

Stone sat with Felicity, tucked into a corner table at La Goulue, one of his favorite restaurants. “You seem a little tired,” he said, as she took her first sip of her Rob Roy.

“It’s the job,” she said, “and it doesn’t change much when I’m out of the country. Of course, when I’m in New York I have you to, ah, entertain me.”

“The pleasure is all mine.”

She smiled. “Don’t you believe it.”

“Tell me about the job,” Stone said. “As much as you can anyway.”

“There are the usual things,” she said. “Agents get themselves killed, sometimes for little or no reason. Last month I had two die in a car crash in Rome. Of course it was on that racetrack the Italians call the Piazza del Popolo. It’s insane.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I have to make the phone calls and write the letters, and even in the case of the car crash, the spouses don’t want to believe there wasn’t foul play. They’ve spent years worrying that a husband or wife will be taken out by the opposition, and I think it’s something of a letdown when they’re lost to a simple accident.”

“Is running the firm more fun than working in it?”

Felicity thought about that for a moment. “Marginally,” she said finally. It’s more fun to know everything instead of just about your own assignment; it’s fun to put the pieces together when you have all the information, or at least all of it that’s available.”

“You don’t always have it all?”

“Of course not. Even in my position I can’t know everything, and Whitehall and Downing Street are insatiable; they have an almost religious belief that their service is all-seeing, all-knowing. We could be closer to that if they would triple our budget, but that’s not going to happen unless there’s another war.”

“What about terrorism?”

“MI-5 does all the domestic stuff; we’re the foreign service, and we did get about a twenty percent bump in the years after 9/11, but inflation has eaten that up. I still have to send one agent out when I’d rather send two or three. Deciding where to allocate the resources is the hardest part of the job.”

“Is there anything fun about it?”

“The equipment is fun. We’ve long since surpassed that Q fellow in the Bond films.” She leaned close to his ear. “I have a pen in my purse that can administer a drug without your feeling it. Then I could walk out in the middle of dinner, and you’d be dead of cardiac arrest before you got to dessert. And the autopsy would reveal nothing.” She smiled. “We call it the toe tag.”

“Is that the sort of information Stanley Whitestone was selling?”

She grimaced. “He was selling everything but, thank God, not the toe tag; that was after his time. If word got out about that, there would be husbands dropping dead every day in their dozens, and not a few wives, too.”

“That reminds me,” Stone said. He produced his iPhone, pressed a couple of buttons and showed her a minute or so of the Seagram footage. “I don’t know if this is the guy,” he said, “but we eliminated all the other candidates. This one has the virtue of dressing British and walking funny.”

“The quality is very good,” she said. “Amazing, in fact. Where did you get the equipment?”

“The cameras are high-definition, off-the-shelf stuff; the iPhone comes from the Apple Store at Fifty-ninth and Fifth.”

“Let me see it again,” she said, and she watched closely as he reran it.

“What do you think?”

“I think he walks funny,” she said, “and I’ve been trying to picture exactly how and why Stanley walked funny. If this is Stanley, then all that weight he has gained has accentuated his gait.” She handed the phone back to Stone. “This is a very good effort,” she said. “It would have taken a lot longer if my people had done it. Can you e-mail me the images?”

“Of course.” Stone tapped a few buttons. “It’s done.”

“Now,” she said, “can you find this man?”

“If he returns to the Seagram Building,” Stone said. “My guy has alerted security there to keep an eye out for him.”

“Have we heard from Dino and the FBI yet?” she asked.

“No, the FBI takes longer than my guys and your guys put together, but it’s a remarkable system for plucking faces out of the files. Do you think Stanley Whitestone might have committed a crime in this country?”

“I don’t doubt it for a moment,” she said, “but I’d be very surprised if the FBI or anybody else has caught him doing it.”

“Well, if he has been caught at something and his image pops up, the FBI will be all over this.”

“And if he should fall into their hands,” she said, emptying her drink, “he’ll tell them everything he knows about us and all he can make up, just to stay out of prison.”

“Perhaps I should have thought of that before asking Dino to do this.”

“No, I think it was the right thing; it might turn up something, and we might get to him before the FBI does.”

“Whatever you could say. I might still be able to stop Dino.”

“No, this isn’t going to be easy; we’re going to need every resource available. The trail is very cold.”